Methods of structure assignment and document element search in an electronic graphical image are known in the art (U.S. Pat. No. 5,416,849 Huang, May 16, 1995).
The capability of the known methods to process only fixed forms, not allowing deviations in field arrangement, is the shortcoming of the methods.
Anyone of the described methods and the system may be taken as a prototype.
The mentioned methods are also applied for, but not limited to, recognition of data input forms, containing typographical and hand-written texts as well as a set of special text-marks for document navigation. Documents as supposed herein are inquiry lists, questionnaires, bank documents with rigid or arbitrary arrangement of data fields.
The technical result consists in the improvement of electronic document elements searching and analyzing capabilities as well as the accuracy of identification of obtained image objects, the increase of noise immunity during the process of object search on the image.
The declared technical result is achieved by using flexible structural description (assuming the possibility of deviations from the fixed format), tools for assignment, search and identification of objects on an image; with further assignment of the estimate of correspondence of the search result to the description. Numbers from 0 to 1 are used for the evaluation. The accuracy of evaluation is 10.sup.−5 (ten to the power of minus five). The value equal to 1 means the absolute correspondence of the obtained result to the description. If the estimate differs from zero, the application of flexible structural description also comprises the stage of forming block regions, i.e. evaluation of the arrangement of the required fields on the basis of the information about the obtained objects.
Structural description comprises the description of spatial and parametric characteristics of document elements, and the logical connections between document elements.
The method of preliminary assignment of a document structure consists in setting a description of the document's logical structure in the form of interdependences of spatial and parametric characteristics of elements, algorithms of obtaining the parameters of the search for each element, methods of identifying the obtained elements, methods of decreasing the number of obtained variants of an element, acceleration of the search for the best variant.